On December 4, 1956 in the Sun Records
studio in Memphis Tennessee, Johnny Cash (just then making a name for
himself), Carl Perkins (who had already had his greatest hit with his
own song “Blue Suede Shoes”), Jerry Lee Lewis (newly signed) and Elvis
Presley (who by this point was definitively Elvis) held a jam session.
Tapes survive of 40-odd songs. This stage musical includes only a
couple of dozen, and a mere three sung during that session: “Peace In
The Valley”, “Down By The Riverside” and Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed
Handsome Man”. (It also includes Perkins’ “Matchbox”, which was
recorded that day though not during the super-session.) There would,
after all, simply be no audience for a show that brought these four
talents together, even in surrogate form, only to have them faithfully
tackle country and gospel numbers. Unsurprisingly, writers Colin Escott
and Floyd Mutrux opt for a jukebox musical. They even throw in a couple
of numbers by Elvis’s girlfriend (who did not perform that day, and has
moreover been renamed here).

This is
far from the most perfunctory of compilation musicals; it is not simply
a mock-concert in which the “acts” trot out their biggies. There is
narrative: its stories of Cash and Perkins ending their Sun contracts
take major liberties with chronology, but no more than having the
Quartet belt out songs not written at the time. There is character
interaction, especially between Perkins and Lewis. Ben Goddard’s Lewis
could not be calmed down by a truckload of tranquillisers; Goddard also
ably reproduces the Killer’s psychopathic piano-playing style, as all
the music in the show is played by those onstage. Robert Britton Lyons,
too, plays a mean guitar as Perkins, though his style sounds more like
Link Wray. (Show me a sharecropper with a gold-top Gibson Les Paul
guitar and I’ll show you a gentleman farmer.) Derek Hagen makes an
efficient Johnny Cash, Michael Malarkey has the most invidious task as
Elvis, and Bill Ward as producer and label owner Sam Phillips is a
glorified master of ceremonies, quite unlike surviving interviews and
footage of Phillips himself. As I say, there are many worse jukebox
shows around, and the legendary status of the original event gives this
show a broad potential audience… which is just as well, since most of
1956’s teenagers are today’s septuagenarians.